In the September 2004 survey we received responses from 54,407,216 sites. The prevailing trends continue - rapid Internet growth of more than 1 million sites a month, and little change in market share among the leading web servers.

The static nature of the web server market is news in itself. The market shares for Apache and Microsoft have shown little change since November 2003, when shifts by domain registrars Register.com and Network Solutions contributed to a 2.8 percent one-month share gain for Apache. That is the longest period of market share stability in the history of our survey, as illustrated by our long-term trends graphic.

The trend remains intact despite the Download.Ject security event in June, which affected sites running Microsoft IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000. The incident appears to have spurred upgrades from Win2K to Windows Server 2003, rather than any noticeable shift toward Apache.

The Senate's computers have previously been criticized for lax security that allowed Republican political operatives to obtain confidential Democratic memos, which were then leaked to the press.

Pair Networks, another large shared hosting provider, increased its storage allowances earlier this month to offer 1 gigabyte plans for the first time, limiting them to its premium webmaster-level accounts. That followed a similar move by Hostway, which doubled the server space on all its plans, pushing its platinum plan to 1.2 gigabytes of storage. 1&1 Internet currently offers 1 gigabyte on its $9.99 a month plan in the U.S. market, and 1.5 gigs on the equivalent plan in the UK.

"We have lost connectivity to global Internet due to failure in the international submarine cable system," SLT said in a statement, adding that a satellite uplink was being used to restore connectivity, but was only able to provide "limited capacity." The telecom provider said 800,000 customers were without Internet access, and attributed the cable failure to the State of Nagaland's anchor. The damage could take several more days to repair, the company said.

Speculation about hosting IPOs is natural, since many of the industry's strongest recent performers are privately held, including Go Daddy, Rackspace, EV1Servers and The Planet. But the history of public companies and hosting is a tortured one, featuring more bankruptcies and dashed hopes than breakout successes. Despite Google's 20 percent jump in today's first day of trading, prospective hosting IPO prospects are treading carefully, weighing the pros and cons of public ownership amid market conditions that have caused several tech companies to postpone offerings.

Go Daddy President Bob Parsons discounts reports that the company is preparing for a public stock offering. "Sure, we think about it," said Parsons. "Do we expect to go public in the near future? No, we don't. But we're always looking at all our options."

But domain names are a price-sensitive business, in which discounters have succeeded in capturing the lion's share of sales, at the expense of full-price registrars such as Register.com and Network Solutions. The most successful player in the domain market is currently Go Daddy, which gained nearly half a million hostnames from March to July. Go Daddy currently prices a new .com domain at $8.95 a year, just a dollar less than Yahoo.

"Anytime someone the size of Yahoo does anything, you have to pay attention," said Bob Parsons, president and founder of Go Daddy, who is keeping a careful eye on competitors. "We looked at (pricing) when 1&1 entered the U.S. market," said Parsons. When 1&1 Internet launched its American unit in January with $5.99 domains, Go Daddy lowered its .com price to $7.95 for several months. Both providers are currently offering aggressive discounts on .us domains, which are priced at $2.99 at 1&1 and $4.95 at Go Daddy.

During July all of the hosters monitored experienced some failed requests, with three sites Pair Networks, Kattare.com, and Cee-Kay. sharing first place.

Operating systems used by the ten most reliable sites was quite mixed, with four running Linux, four FreeBSD and two Windows (Datapipe on Windows 2003 and EasyNet on Windows 2000).

With 304,000 active sites and 600,000 hostnames, Yahoo is already a major player in small business hosting, with its turnkey online stores proving popular with e-commerce beginners. It previously sold domains for $35, adopting lower pricing in late June on a trial basis. It will continue to work with wholesale domain provider Melbourne IT.

"We think domains are an important on-ramp to the (small business) market," said Rich Riley, the vice president and general manager of Yahoo Small Business. "In looking at the domain market, we realized there was a great opportunity to increase our market share in this important sector."

The Weather Channel web site at Weather.com had some reliability problems in the moments immediately preceding Charley's landfall Friday afternoon, but soon stabilized. The network offers round-the-clock coverage of weather, and experiences its largest audiences during major hurricanes. Its web site is hosted by UUnet, a unit of MCI.

The National Hurricane Center, the U.S. government's central source for hurricane information, has been available throughout the storm. The NHC site is hosted on government servers at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

As awareness of phishing grows among consumers, hosting providers and law enforcement officials, the operating window for phishing crews is likely to shrink. But anti-phishing efforts haven't stemmed the continued growth of these scams, which combine technology and trickery to steal login information for web banking and online retail sites. There were 1,422 separate phishing scams in June, according to the APWG, a 52 percent increase from May. Nearly 500 attacks targeted Citibank alone.

Q. You've said that Applied Cryptography described a "mathematical utopia" of algorithms and protocols: what was the attraction of that utopia for you?

A. Cryptographic security comes from mathematics, not from people and not from machines. Mathematical security is available to everyone, both the weak and the powerful alike, and gives ordinary people a very powerful tool to protect their privacy. That's the cryptographic ideal of security.

Q. To what extent is the Internet and its global linking of computers together to blame for the destruction of that utopia?

A. They're entirely to blame, although "blame" is not really the right word. Cryptography worked well in the era of radios and telegraphs, where the threat was eavesdropping and mathematical cryptography could protect absolutely. But in the world of computers and networks, the threats are more complex and involve software and system vulnerabilities. Cryptography is much less able to provide security in this new world; that's the cryptographic reality of security.

Q. In Secrets & Lies you wrote that you had an epiphany about security in April 1999: can you say what it was?

A. As a cryptographic consultant, I did a lot of work analyzing operating systems. Invariably I would break them, but almost never would I break the mathematical cryptography. I eventually realized that cryptography is the strongest part of a very weak system, and that the system aspects around the cryptography - the software, the operating system, the network, the user interface, etc. - are much more important.

Q. One of the ideas in your book Secrets & Lies is that at the root of the computer security problems we face today is the lack of accountability by software manufacturers for their faulty products: why do you think that they have managed to evade the responsibility - unlike everyone else - despite the scale of the damage and the associated profits?

Amsterdam-based VIA Net.Works hosts about 204k hostnames, and says it will add 4,000 new customers by buying PSINet Europe from majority owner Israel Corporation Limited. VIA will take over PSINet Europe operations in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, but PSINet Europe's U.K. operations are not part of the acquisition.

The www.bcentral.com domain now redirects to the new Microsoft Small Business Center, which offers shared hosting accounts starting at $29.95 a month, with domain names available for $20 a year. Existing bCentral customers will see no change in services, according to the frequently asked questions about the changes. Microsoft says more than 2 million customers have used bCentral services.

But it turns out Internet Explorer isn't the only browser vulnerable to spoofing. On July 30 a published exploit demonstrated how to convincingly spoof a secure web site (in this case PayPal) in Firefox and Mozilla by using XML to alter the browser interface (Note: The spoof doesn't work in IE).

The attack on DoubleClick caused performance problems for the network's clients. But in recent weeks, several smaller banner networks have been used to inject malicious code into web sites. In each case, the banner code serves as the trigger for a string of exploit scripts that trick Internet Explorer into downloading malware or spyware.

In a column a few months ago, I looked at the range of anti-spam measures that were being developed. It seems appropriate to review how things have progressed since then. Although the graph of spam as a percentage of total email appears to be flattening it is still rising: even if it flattens further, Internet users are still faced with a future where the vast majority of their email is unwanted, to say nothing of offensive and downright dangerous.

As many predicted, anti-spam legislation – both in the US and European Union - has proved a damp squib. It is true that lawsuits have been filed (and some even won), but these are mainly to make the companies concerned look good Internet citizens. The effect on the thousands of small-scale, anonymous spammers operating from faraway countries is zero.

More promising are moves on the technical front to combine two similar approaches to dealing with one aspect of spam, that of address spoofing. The idea is simple – which makes it more likely to succeed. Those sending email register lists of their servers that can legitimately do so; when a message is sent, recipients can check whether the purported email address corresponds to the real server of origin. If it does not, it is likely to be spam.

The idea seems to have surfaced first in a 2002 memo from Paul Vixie, the principal architect of the BIND program. It was picked up later by Pobox.com's Meng Weng Wong, who formulated what became Sender Policy Framework (SPF). There is an explanation of how it works as well as a FAQ.

Linux enthusiasts are not alone in finding their "World" running on Microsoft software, as the Mac World Expo is also hosted on Windows Server 2003.

Q. In April MyHosting.com introduced a "blended hosting environment" for shared hosting customers that includes both Windows and Linux accounts within a single plan. You'd previously been a Windows-only provider. What led you to add Linux hosting, and to adopt this particular approach?

A. Simply put, demand from our customers. Our experience with our customers showed us that it's not the operating system which drives their choices, but the availability of the applications. Most popular web applications are either in Perl or PHP and use MySQL. We had two options: either install Perl, PHP and MySQL on Windows platform, or offer our customers the native platform which these tools are developed on. This is the main reason we decided to offer a native Linux offering at no additional cost to our web hosting customers. So they get 2 for the price of 1, both Windows Server 2003 and Linux under the same account.

July was a strong month for hosting companies in the Netherlands, four of whom experienced one-month growth of 23 percent or more, as measured by our Hosting Provider Switching Analysis. New sites accounted for nearly all the growth at NXS, Leaseweb and ProServe BV, while NETHolding/Garnier Projects gained 3k hostnames from yet another Dutch provider, BIT.

New.net, which offers domain names outside the ICANN top-level domain (TLD) system, had the largest one-month improvement, as measured by percent growth in hostnames. New.net domains (which include .shop, .xxx, .ltd and .mp3) aren't recognized by the centralized domain name system, but are accessible to customers of partner ISPs or those who have downloaded software enabling New.net domains. New.net claims that 174 million Internet users worldwide are able to access sites using its domains.

In the heady early days of the Internet as a mass medium – the mid 1990s, say – one of the key acronyms was VOD: Video On Demand. The idea was that this wonderful new Information Superhighway (another phrase very much of that era) would mainly be used for downloading video content. It never happened – in part because people found using the hyperlinked Web a much richer experience, and also because the average bandwidth was simply insufficient.

But the VOD idea was not totally wrong. One of the drivers of Internet uptake among some users – the younger ones – was downloading music. The key breakthrough was the MP3 compression technology, since this allowed a complete song to be downloaded in a reasonable time even with the existing connection speeds.

MP3 is in fact a relatively old idea – a classic case of a solution in search of a problem. Although it has established itself as the de facto standard for music compression, things have moved on. For example, an updated version of MP3 called MP3Pro has been developed. A free player and encoder are available, but relatively few products support it.

Both MP3 and MP3Pro are proprietary standards. This has led to the creation of a completely free alternative, called Ogg Vorbis. Industry backing for the group behind Ogg Vorbis has come from the streaming company RealNetworks. The latter has awarded one of its Helix Community Grants to promote the format as part of its open source Helix platform.

In the August 2004 survey we received responses from 53,341,867 sites, a gain of more than 1.2 million sites from July. The August increased marked the sixth time in the past year that the survey has shown a monthly gain exceeding 1 million sites. In the last 12 months, the Internet has grown by 10.2 million hostnames.

Market share remained steady among major web servers, with Apache making modest gains of 0.3 percent in hostnames and just under 0.2 percent in active sites. Microsoft's market share remains steady in the wake of a security event in June connected to Microsoft-IIS 5.0. As was noted last month, previous headline-grabbing worms and security events have had little direct impact on web server market share.